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What Are The Tea Party’s Plans?

Last week, Politico reported that the Tea Party is back in action with a new strategy and a growing membership. While discussions from the April 25th caucus meeting were not made public, Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks (the most influential tea party organization in the United States), spoke about Tea Party 3.0 and the future direction of the Tea Party at a Miller Center Forum in March.

During the forum, Kibbe noted that the Tea Party is going to focus on getting their policy proposals focused on reducing the budget and reforming entitlements introduced by members of Congress. He also noted there are at least ten Senators whom the Tea Party has helped elect to office, including “rock stars” Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

The plan for 2014, according to Kibbe, is to go after a number of Democratic seats that are up for reelection in 2014 and to focus on places like South Carolina. According to Kibbe, “We can do better than Lindsey Graham in the primary.” He also argued there is a big opportunity is to solve the Missouri problem and get behind principled fiscal conservatives in Arkansas, North Dakota and Alaska.

Kibbe called the Tea Party a “leaderless,” decentralized movement, united by a set of values based on limited government. One must view it as a bottom-up movement. Kibbe said the reason why the Tea Party wasn’t as successful in the 2012 election was because the top of the presidential ticket was the Achilles Heel of the Party. According to Kibbe, Romney was unelectable and he was anathema to the Tea Party principle of limited government. Kibbe asserts that the Tea Party has changed the way the Republican Party controls politics. He said, “There’s no going back to a model controlled by a small group of experts like Karl Rove. People like Rand Paul can go to the internet to get funding and endorsements.”

Watch the Forum video to learn more about the Tea Party’s plans for 2013 and beyond.